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A photographer Yvette Roman says she has lost a job shooting an ad campaign for Canon. Reason?, well, she was told she does not have 50,000 followers on Instagram.
This tells us that having good social media following matters a lot in commercial photography industry.
Roman recently appeared for an interview with the online entrepreneur education platform The Futur to talk about what does it require for one to be a professional photographer in the industry today. In the interview, she tells how she lost out on the biggest job opportunity of her career.
I’ll tell you that I booked a huge job — it would have been the biggest job of my career, commercially. I’ll just say it: with Canon. To shoot an ad campaign for them. I got the job, it was amazing. And then literally 20 minutes later, after I had already started making calls to start booking the crew because it was coming real fast, they called me and said, “Oh my God, we can’t hire you.”
When I asked, “Why?”, I was told, We are sorry, you don’t have 50,000 followers on Instagram.
Naturally confused because initially she was told that she was a perfect fit for this particular job.
“At first, I thought, ‘Okay, I’m giving up, that’s it, I’m done,’” Roman says. “I never wanted to see a camera again. That’s it.”
But now she takes this as a lesson learned. It is important to have good social media following in this industry and every emerging photographer should have good following, specially on Instagram.
